Wheat and Chaff

One thing a period of depression teaches you is who your real friends are.  It gives people an opportunity to show you their best  -  or their worst.

A person who is ill with depression is not good company. She doesn't have the emotional energy to initiate anything - events, phone conversations, trips, get-togethers.  She doesn't have sparkling, witty conversational gambits. She doesn't return calls, because she has nothing to say. She pulls out of arrangements all the time because she doesn't feel up to it.

And the people who like her because she's fun and lively and full of ideas, think up lots of ideas of things to do for themselves, and do them anyway, and find new lively folk to keep them company.

And the people who like her just because they like her, they are the ones still standing shoulder to shoulder with her at the end of the dark time. The people who left her messages on her phone and her Facebook and pushed through the letterbox. "No need to reply, I was just thinking about you". Who were happy to walk down the road for a coffee and a cake for an hour, or pop their head around the door of the office or the kitchen just to say hi and give her a hug. The people who knew she could not speak, could not explain the grey curtain that had come down between her and the rest of the world, but sat patiently on the other side of it just so she knew they were there.

If you had broken your leg snowboarding, and had to fly home by air-ambulance; or been in a spectacular car smash; or even having a hernia repaired or fibroids cauterized or something completely unglamorous and non-dramatic; everyone would still understand that you were ill. Lots of people would visit with flowers, and cards, offer to help out with the kids or the cooking.

Depression is not like that. Its grey darkness leaches out to anyone who gets too close. It's the 21st century Black Death, daubing its invisible cross on the door. Yet when she emerges, blinking in the unfamiliar sunshine, trying to find her centre of gravity like a new born calf lifting itself onto suddenly-discovered legs; her true friends, the people whom she loves and who love her back, are there waiting.

And she knew they were there all along, because they had crushed their notes and crammed their fingers and whispered their care through the cracks and faults in the tired, sticky creosote-black splintery wood of her misery shed, and said, "We are here. Always".

And every one of their kindnesses took a stone from her pocket until she could break the surface of her life and breathe again.